For most Canadians, Remembrance Day is a moment to reflect on the sacrifices of the past and how they helped underwrite much of the freedom and prosperity we take as a given. For Pierre Poilievre and the Conservative Party of Canada, it was apparently an opportunity to sow division within Canada — and confusion within its Christian community.
“Contrary to what Liberals claimed last year,” Poilievre wrote on social media, “Chaplains are banned from prayers at Remembrance Day ceremonies.” As proof, he cited a piece in the Epoch Times, a far-right publication with close ties to the Falun Gong movement and a well-documented history of spreading conspiracy theories. The company’s CFO also faces money laundering charges in an alleged $67-million US operation, one described by the US Southern District attorney as “sprawling, transnational scheme.”
Not exactly a credible source, in other words.
This is all a deliberate misrepresentation of a decidedly mundane directive handed down in 2023 by the Chaplain General, one that encourages a more inclusive approach to public addresses for military members. “Chaplains must ensure that all members feel respected and included by undertaking inclusive practices that respect the diversity of beliefs within the CAF.”
Daniel Brereton, an Anglican priest in the Diocese of Toronto, provided a more robust explanation on social media. “Once again, the directive from the Chaplain General of Canada does not ‘ban prayer’ or ‘prevent Christians from practicing their faith,’” he wrote. “No one is stopping you from going to church. No one is stopping you from praying. No one is stopping you from actually following Jesus in your life. Prohibiting the hegemony of my religion in a multifaith society is not the same as prohibiting or ‘banning’ my religion.”
Of all the things to lie about, this is one of the oddest. There are, after all, easily accessible videos of the Remembrance Day ceremonies in question, as well as any number of people who can attest to their own experiences on Monday and the presence of chaplains. As NDP MP Charlie Angus noted on social media, “I thank the reverends who prayed at our services today and will pray this evening.” It’s as though Poilievre is determined to test that famous line — well, one of them — from George Orwell’s 1984: “The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”
In this, he has an awful lot in common with Donald Trump. The former and future US president routinely gas-lit his own supporters, whether it was about the size of his crowds or the trajectory of incoming hurricanes. As presidential historian Michael Beschloss said, “I have never seen a president in American history who has lied so continuously and so outrageously as Donald Trump, period.”
Poilievre won’t be able to match Trump here, if only because that’s not humanly possible. His lies are appropriately Canadian, by comparison: more modest in scale, less adventurous in content. But they’re still corrosive to our collective understanding of the world and the role that truth plays in it.
Take his continued misrepresentation of the carbon tax and its supposedly catastrophic impacts on the cost of living (and apologies in advance, but there will be some math here). In his social media posts he routinely claims the federal government plans to “quadruple the carbon” tax on gasoline by 2030 to 61 cents per litre. But his math makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. To arrive at that 61 cent figure, he includes the Parliamentary Budget Officer’s modeled costs of the Clean Fuel Standard of 17 cents per litre, then adding the GST on top of it all.
Never mind, for the moment, that the government’s modeling shows the CFS would only add 4.3 cents per litre by 2030. Let’s just take Poilievre’s figures at face value. With the carbon tax on gasoline already at 17.6 cents per litre (18.5 if you include the GST, as he has), said quadrupling is already mathematically impossible.
If you strip out the Clean Fuel Standard — and you should since it isn’t actually a carbon tax, much as Poilievre wants to pretend otherwise — the total increase by 2030 is 21.7 cents per litre, or a little more than double where the carbon tax on gasoline is at today. Yes, the rebate would more than double as well, although Poilievre’s not about to tell his supporters that. But why lie about the size of the increase when you can make plenty of political hay over what’s actually true?
Because, I suspect, this is just who he is. No, Pierre Poilievre isn’t Donald Trump, much as some Liberals will desperately try to pretend otherwise. He isn’t nearly as charismatic, for one thing, and lacks Trump’s almost pathological need to be liked and admired. If anything, he has the opposite tendency.
He’s also still beholden to a parliamentary system that, for all of its grotesque exaggerations of our democratic intentions, can still hold leaders to account if they stray too far or act too rashly. And while a Poilievre government would threaten some of our institutions, most notably the CBC, they haven’t yet been tested (or weakened) to the same extent as America’s.
But Poilievre’s wanton disregard for the truth and his willingness to weaponize abuses of it should still be deeply worrying. “Post-truth is pre-fascism,” American historian Timothy Snyder warned in his 2017 book On Tyranny. “To abandon facts is to abandon freedom.” We’d all do well to remember that as we watch Trump’s return to power in America — and Poilievre’s continued pursuit of it here at home.
What Orwell would say about “ethical oil”
When it comes to Conservatives, every accusation is a confession. The latest data point here is the Alberta government’s decision to use the province’s classrooms to preach the gospel of “ethical oil” — the exact same sort of politicization they objected to when it involved teachers talking about the oil and gas industry’s less attractive features. As then-Education Minister Adriana LaGrange said, “Alberta has a great story to tell about our responsible energy sector, and educators should not be attacking it. We'll get politics out of the classroom.”
What she meant to say is that they would get the UCP’s preferred politics into the classroom. And, well, mission accomplished: the new curriculum includes a directive from new Minister of Education Demetrios Nicolaides that students be taught about “Alberta’s reputation as the most ethical producer of oil in the world” and “the importance of natural resources in enabling and sustaining Alberta’s society.”
This is, as a bunch of educators pointed out to me on social media, an invitation to some very good trouble. Social studies teachers could easily use this as an opportunity to introduce their students to propaganda techniques, refine their critical thinking skills, or provide other forms of intellectual enrichment that don’t involve getting them to parrot industry talking points.
But it’s also worth pointing out how ludicrous this is. Alberta isn’t even the most “ethical” producer of oil in Canada, never mind the world. Whether it’s the absence of massive tailing ponds and orphaned wells or lower methane and carbon dioxide emissions, the oil and gas industries in Saskatchewan, Newfoundland and British Columbia are all demonstrably better.
Globally, meanwhile, I’ve yet to hear anyone in the oil and gas industry explain how Alberta’s high-carbon oil is more ethical than the barrels being produced in Norway, where emissions are far lower and the wealth generated by the extraction of fossil fuels is captured by (and for) Norway’s citizens. In Norway, oil companies pay a staggering 78 per cent tax on their net income. In Alberta, by comparison, owners of major oil sands projects can pay royalties as low as 1 per cent until they recoup all of their up-front costs, while combined corporate income taxes are 27 per cent.
Alberta is always welcome to aspire to becoming the world’s most ethical oil and gas producer. But actually earning it would require the UCP government and the industry to actually do the work required there. And no, that doesn’t mean taking credit for labour and environmental laws in Canada they resisted or forms of social progress (same-sex marriage, for example) they opposed in the past. It means acknowledging the industry’s ongoing deficiencies and actually spending the money required to address them.
The hysterical response from the Alberta government and its oil and gas industry to the federal government’s proposed emissions cap shows just how far they are from actually walking the walk here. They continue to emphasize the fact that Canada would be the only country in the world with an emissions cap for its oil and gas industry. What they still don’t realize is that this is an obvious selling feature they could easily embrace if they were serious about showing the world that our oil is actually ethical. And they continue to act as though emissions reductions are a problem for another time, another government, another generation, which strikes me as a deeply unethical approach to managing intergenerational burden sharing.
In an op-ed published by the Edmonton Journal, former Cenovus Energy CEO Alex Pourbaix said the quiet part out loud. After suggesting that the federal government’s approach was “all stick, no carrot,” he proceeded to complain that the carrots being offered just weren’t big enough. “The federal government’s Investment Tax Credit has been a good start but, given its design and limitations, will cover only a fraction of the industry’s capital and operating costs of implementing carbon reduction.”
In other words, this highly profitable industry with some of the highest carbon emissions on earth wants taxpayers to foot more — and maybe all — of their bill. One wonders how Alberta’s teachers will include that in their lesson plans.
Alberta’s Minister of Environment and Protected Areas is also apparently its Minister of Gaslighting and Trolling
The double standard that Danielle Smith’s UCP government has applied to fossil fuels and renewable energy has been obvious from almost the day it first took office. It first paused the development of wind and solar projects and then placed onerous regulations on their operations, all while allowing oil and gas operations to proceed unchecked. So much for Conservatives not wanting to pick winners and losers.
Now, it seems, the UCP is openly trolling the public on this front. Take its recent announcement of a new recycling program that seems designed to piss off anyone who’s paying attention to the growing threat posed by unreclaimed wells and ever-more-massive tailings ponds. “Solar panels, wind turbines and EV batteries are flooding into our country,” Environment Minister Rebecca Schulz said in a recent video shared by Premier Smith. “We have already started to see alarming images of solar panels and wind turbines piling up in ditches, fields, and landfills throughout North America.”
Um, what? The idea that solar panels and wind turbines are “piling up in ditches” beggars belief, but Schultz was just getting started. “Canada needs a better recycling system or these liabilities will end up costing us big-time. So under the leadership of Premier Danielle Smith, we are making sure Albertans will lead the way again, starting by applying a fee to solar panels, wind turbines and electric vehicles. They’ll cover the cost of setting up a first-in-kind recycling program so taxpayers don’t foot the bill.”
This is the political equivalent of stepping over dollars to pick up pennies. The cleanup bill from the oil and gas industry that taxpayers stand to get stiffed with is already well into the tens of billions. I’ve yet to see any evidence that wind, solar, and other renewable technologies have left even a penny on the public’s ledger so far. And yet, here we are.
Schultz clearly knows what she’s doing with this nonsense. “Some of the usual suspects, I’m sure, will complain that we are penalizing green initiatives,” she said. “But I would say to that: oh well, let them complain.”
I’m sure this got a few chuckles within the UCP’s inner sanctum. Good one, folks. Sure, you’re driving away billions of dollars in investment in the province and depriving rural communities — you know, your base — of millions in tax revenue. But at least you owned the libs, right?
Let’s see how funny Albertans think this is in 2027.
Silver linings and blue skies
I am, by my nature, an incorrigible optimist, which means I spent the days after the US election trying to some conceivable benefit in the objectively appalling results. Could it force progressives to focus more on material conditions, thereby winning back parts of the working and middle class that they’ve lost over the last few years? Could it result in an even better and more transformative Democratic candidate in 2028? And could it potentially expose Trump’s brand of politics for the populist sham it is? Time will tell, I suppose.
But one silver lining that has already become very obvious is the flood of online refugees from Twitter/X to Bluesky. It’s added more than 700,000 new users over the last week, with many high-profile Twitter/X accounts packing up their digital luggage. “It’s become a refuge for people who want to have the kind of social media experience that Twitter used to provide, but without all the far-right activism, the misinformation, the hate speech, the bots and everything else,” social media researcher Axel Bruns told The Guardian. “The more liberal kind of Twitter community has really now escaped from there and seems to have moved en masse to Bluesky.”
Can confirm, as the kids say. I’m doing most of my posting there, and have already noticed a modest improvement in my demeanour and disposition. And despite having 1/10th as many followers as I do/did on Twitter/X, I’m getting similar levels of engagement — and without the attendant abuse that had become background noise at the other place. The fact that it’s not owned by Elon Musk is a major plus, obviously. So too is the ability to actually block other users and detach quote tweets, which eliminates much of the incentive to “dunk” on other users that has come to define the experience at Twitter/X.
Is it an echo chamber? Sure. Am I still drawn to the idea of fighting back against misinformation and deceit in the other place? Absolutely. But when the algorithm actively suppresses those efforts — and in many cases, the people doing them — the idea of resistance becomes almost impossibly futile. Musk is free to turn Twitter/X into a right-wing propaganda machine, and put his thumb (heck, his entire hand) on the scale to achieve that outcome. But we’re equally free to decline to participate in it.
After waiting for one of the alternatives to Twitter/X to take flight, it’s fitting that Bluesky is the one to finally do it. Feel free to seek me out over there at maxfawcett.bsky.social — and follow the National Observer team too at nationalobserver.bsky.social.
Recommended Reading
On his Substack “Bug Eyed and Shameless,” Justin Ling argues that progressives need to learn how to be optimists if they want to win. I could not possibly agree more. Right now, progressive politics tend to be defined by a kind of overarching pessimism, whether it’s about human nature’s ongoing struggles with racism, sexism, and other bigotries, the selfishness and greed of our business elites or the threat (and fear) of climate change. None of this is wrong, per se. But you can be right about a lot of things and still lose elections: just ask Hillary Clinton.
As Ling writes, progressives need to rediscover their capacity for dreaming big. “Liberalism has always been at its best when it imagines building unlikely things. FDR’s New Deal and LBJ’s Great Society were examples of ambition wrapped in optimism. Building NATO, the European Union, the World Bank, the International Court of Justice, and so on — all wildly unlikely, impractical, unwieldy and ultimately good projects that were made possible because politicians thought in terms of ambitious futures instead of current anxieties. The internet itself was built out of technological advancement sponsored by government funding, then enabled — in a responsible way — by smart government regulation.”
Amen to that. It’s time for progressives to start articulating a more optimistic vision for our future, one in which things like equality and justice are combined with the pursuit of prosperity, abundance, and human flourishing. And it can’t happen fast enough.
In the Globe and Mail, Generation Squeeze founder Paul Kershaw continues laying out the case for intergenerational justice. As he writes, “the middle-earning millennial in Ontario pays $276 more in income taxes each year toward healthy retirements than did boomers with comparable incomes in 1976 – a 28-per-cent increase. A high-earning young Ontarian pays an extra $4,124 today – up 43 per cent. Again, similar patterns exist in other provinces. And this tax bill will increase still further, as Canada approaches peak population aging in the years ahead.”
If Baby Boomers and early Gen-Xers want to prevent younger Canadians from taking a rightward turn in future elections, they must start supporting ideas that address this state of affairs. Pierre Poilievre, after all, already knows how to get them angry. What’s needed is a permission structure for progressive politicians to take a different path.
And finally, Bloomberg writes about the approaching schism between Trump and China on energy policy — one that will put Canada in a very difficult position. “Trump appears to be on the cusp of barricading the US economy behind a tariff wall and cementing its role as the world’s biggest fossil fuel producer. If China wants to build the alliances that it will need to acquire the status of a global hegemon, it has the perfect opportunity now to present itself as the clean alternative to an oil-stained and declining American empire.”
Canada may have no choice but to go along with Trump’s plans, if only because the alternative would be so economically ruinous. But we should keep our eyes locked on to what’s happening in the rest of the world, and be prepared to act (and adapt) accordingly. Trump’s embrace of fossil fuels might be good news in the very near term for American companies. But he may also push China to embrace the energy transition even more aggressively than it already has, and bring the global south along for the ride. In a weird way, and with some time, his election may do more to help global emissions reduction efforts than harm them.
Then again, that might just be me trying to find another silver lining in all of this.